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Tag: MySQL

Docker Part 1: Running Containers

Published on September 26, 2015

Docker is a containerization technology that’s been getting quite a bit of attention over the last year or two. It offers a more lightweight, flexible and repeatable alternative to creating and running full Virtual Machines (VMs). In this, the first in a series of posts on Docker, I’ll look at how to run an application inside of a pre-built container image. In this series, I’ll look at:

  1. Running Containers (this post);
  2. Building Images: How to create a new container image, customized to your requirements;
  3. Disposable Containers: Using containers to run a short-lived job rather than a long-lived service;
  4. Composing an Environment Stack: Creating an environment composed of multiple linked containers.
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Integration Tests with Selenium and tomcat7-maven-plugin

Published on January 18, 2013

Integration tests are a valuable tool in the development of robust, quality software. Once each individual component has been unit tested, the integration test gives some confidence that the system stack as a whole does what is expected. Like unit tests, a great deal of the value of integration tests comes from the regression suite that they create. After any defect fix or enhancement to software, the unit and integration tests confirm that all existing features do exactly what they did before. If these tests are automated, they cost nothing to run and they’ll stay silent unless a defect is discovered.

I’ve looked at unit testing a few times in the past but this post explains how to integration test the full stack – database, Java application and web server. In this case, I’m running the tests as part of the Maven build lifecycle. As usual, I’m working from the Spanners demo (available for download), mainly working against the spanners-struts web component.

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DbUnit and Jailer

Published on November 23, 2011

The easiest way of creating datasets for DbUnit tests is often to script out values from a real database. This can be done with a few lines of code in DbUnit itself (see DbUnit FAQs) but it’s easier to use a database tool that can export to DbUnit dataset files. Jailer is one such tool. In its own words:

Jailer is a tool for database subsetting, schema and data browsing. It exports consistent, referentially intact row-sets from relational databases. It removes obsolete data without violating integrity. It is DBMS agnostic (by using JDBC), platform independent, and generates DbUnit datasets, hierarchically structured XML, and topologically sorted SQL-DML.

It’s pretty easy to set up and has the advantage that it can flexibly script target data as well as all associated data necessary to satisfy foreign key constraints.

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Installing WordPress

Published on November 1, 2009

This is post number four and I’m going off topic already. This post is a technical note on how to install WordPress on a desktop PC.

After installing WordPress on my hosting service (hosted on Easily if you’re interested) I wanted a copy on my home PC as an offline backup and to generally fiddle with. As I’m likely to zap my PC soon (Vista is dead, long live Windows 7) , I’m keeping a note of how I did this.

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